Performance of Bind 9.2.3 vs BIND 4.8.3 - DNS

This is a discussion on Performance of Bind 9.2.3 vs BIND 4.8.3 - DNS ; Hello All,
I want to upgrade from BIND 4.8.3 to BIND 9.2.3. For this reason, I am
doing a performance testing on the BIND 9.2.3 nameserver and the BIND
4.8.3 nameserver.
I am doing this by measuring the time taken ...

I am using the above piece of code to send queries to:
1) A BIND 9.2.3 nameserver and,
2) A BIND 4.8.3 nameserver
Both the nameservers run (not simultaneously) on the same system and
are not in any network.

I took about 50 readings for both nameservers.
The readings of this test reflect that the response time (the value of
query_time) in case of the 9.2.3 server is almost 50% more than the
4.8.3 server. i.e, a 50% performance degradation.

This is holding me from upgrading the DNS. I know that it may be
argued that BIND 9 provides security features -- etc. But, what is the
point when the most basic query processing is not very efficient?